TMA LIVE wrote...
staindgrey wrote...
The other endings are already pointless. I'd sleep much better if I could just convince myself those endings never, ever happened and I imagined their existence.
But I don't consider them pointless. They aren't the endings people wanted, but I don't consider them invalid.
It's not so much about what I "wanted", I want to make that clear. There's a distinction.
In narrative, it's important to end a story in the same manner in which it has been told throughout. In the ME series, we have been led to believe that all of our decisions would lead to an ultimate conclusion, based directly off of our actions. We see the world shape around us in the manner of our choosing, with consequences for every action.
The ending, as it stands, erases all of that. It makes every decision you've made in the last three games suddenly become a moot point. All that you've done, regardless of what race you saved or destroyed or what happened with the Council or who survived and who didn't... It's all rendered irrelevent by Bioware's choice to give you a "final decision" that is completely and entirely, in the context of
story, rendered separate from everything else you've ever done. If you cured the genophage and gave the quarians their homeworld and saved the rachni and fought for peace among all races... Doesn't matter. Pick one of these three options and **** up everything you've done. Now.
And that doesn't even bring up the fact that the laws of the universe are turned on their head with this sudden god-figure coming out of nowhere and explaining almost nothing, or how the Reapers suddenly become an entirely different entity in the series's final seconds, shifting from an ominous, "We are each a nation, independent, free of all weakness," to basically being a .exe command to erase organic life every now and then to save it from being erased by synthetic life every now and again. (Wtf.)
I'm sorry, the English major in me can't forgive all the storytelling laws broken by this ending. It's unacceptable.